Biography: J. Lorand Matory

Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Center for African and African American Research at Duke University

J. Lorand Matory is a leading scholar of African and African-American religion, including trans-Atlantic Yoruba religion, which has shaped social order and traditions of worship and healing all over the Americas. He also studies ethnic diversity in the Black population of the United States.
His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Fellowship.

Choice magazine selected Dr. Matory’s Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion as an Outstanding Book of the Year in 1994, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the best book of the year from the African Studies Association. He has also published over forty articles in various peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, newspapers, and magazines. His third book, Stigma and Culture: Global Migrations and the Crisis of Identity in Black America, began as the 2008 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, the preeminent lecture series in anthropology, and will be published this year by the University of Chicago Press. Most recently, Dr. Matory received the Humboldt Prize, the highest academic honor awarded by the German government.